A long-overlooked player is emerging as a key player in the Trump-Russia investigation

Brad Parscale was the director of the Trump campaign's digital operations.

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Screenshot/Fox

A congressional committee wants to
interview President Donald Trump's digital director as part of
its investigation.Investigators are probing whether voter information
stolen by Russian hackers made its way to the Trump
campaign.A top official said Russia targeted election systems in
at least 21 states.

The House Intelligence Committee plans to interview the
digital director for President Donald Trump's campaign,
Brad Parscale, as it continues to investigate whether any
collusion occurred between the campaign and Russia, according to
a recent CNN report.

The ranking Democrat on the committee, Rep. Adam Schiff,
would not confirm whether Parscale had been invited to testify as
part of the congressional investigation.

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But Schiff told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow this week that he is
"very interested in finding out" whether there was "Russian
funding or support" for the Trump campaign's data analytics
operation, "or Russian assistance in any way with gathering data"
that was then used by the campaign.

Congressional investigators are now probing whether voter
information stolen by Russian hackers from election databases in
several states made its way to the Trump campaign, Time reported on
Thursday. The data operation Parscale directed was supervised by
Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who is now being
scrutinized by the FBI over his contacts with Russia's
ambassador and the CEO of a sanctioned Russian bank in
December.

"If any campaign, Trump or otherwise, used inappropriate
data the questions are, how did they get it? From whom? And with
what level of knowledge?" the former top Democratic staffer on
the House Intelligence
Committee, Michael Bahar, told Time. "That is a crux of the
investigation."

"Jared got [Brad] hired, despite the fact that a number of
people in the campaign wondered whether he had any idea what he
was doing," the person said. "He's Jared's boy. I had [campaign]
deputies telling me they couldn't question anything the guy did
or said, and they were unhappy about that."

Parscale did not respond to a request for comment. He is
now the digital media director for America First Policies, a
nonprofit group whose aim is to bolster Trump's agenda.

Kushner also did not respond to a request for
comment.

Parscale's firm, Giles-Parscale, was paid a whopping $91
million by the Trump campaign, which famously shunned television
ads. According to CNN, the data
operation "helped the Trump campaign figure out where the
candidate's message was resonating in states like Michigan and
Wisconsin, places where conventional political wisdom suggested
they would be wasting time and money."

A senior GOP strategist who worked with
Parscale on the Republican National Committee's digital
operations last year denied that he oversaw or was even aware of
any nefarious collaboration between hackers and the campaign.

"When it was reported that they'd be calling up Parscale, I knew
there was a 0% chance that they had anything," the strategist
said, referring to the House Intelligence Committee. "The
questions they want to ask him are apparently some of the most
basic digital marketing questions, and other simple ones like
'how would the Russians have known which precincts to target?'"

At least one Republican operative, however, made use of voter
data stolen by Russian hackers last year: Florida political
strategist Aaron Nevins.

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Then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks on the USS Iowa in San Pedro, Los Angeles, California, United States September 15, 2015.

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Reuters

Guccifer 2.0, the self-described hacker that US intelligence
officials and cybersecurity experts have linked to Russian
military intelligence, sent 2.5 gigabytes of voter analysis
data compiled by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee
to Nevins late last summer, The Wall Street Journal
reported late last month.

The documents provided to Nevins, who then posted them on
his blog, analyzed districts in Florida, Kentucky, Pennsylvania,
Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. They showed "how many people
were dependable Democratic voters, how many were likely
Democratic voters but needed a nudge, how many were frequent
voters but not committed, and how many were core Republican
voters - the kind of data strategists use in planning ad buys and
other tactics," the Journal said.

The exposure of that voter data, which Nevins remarked was
worth "millions of dollars," led at least one Republican campaign
consultant, Anthony Bustamante, to "adjust" the voting targets of
the campaign he was advising at the time, according to the
Journal.

"Basically if this was a war, this is the map to where all
the troops are deployed," Nevins told Guccifer 2.0 in a text
message, according to the Journal.

Nevins said he had no regrets in using the "map," even if
it had been handed to the Russians.

"If your interests align, never shut any doors in
politics," he told The Journal.

The theft of sensitive voter data by Russian-linked hackers
like Guccifer 2.0 has left upcoming elections vulnerable to
manipulation, experts say. Virginia and New Jersey will hold
gubernatorial elections later this year, and all 435 seats in the
House and one-third of the 100 seats in the Senate will be
contested in the 2018 midterm elections.

Jeanette Manfra, a top official in the DHS's National
Protection and Programs Directorate, told the Senate
Intelligence Committee on Wednesday that Russian hackers
targeted election systems in at least 21 states last year.
Bloomberg reported last week that as many as 39 states were
targeted.

Sam Liles, the DHS's top cyber official, told lawmakers on
Wednesday that the Russians probed election infrastructure and
successfully infiltrated a "small number of networks." According
to Time, the hackers successfully altered voter information in at
least one election database and stole thousands of voter records
containing private information like Social Security
numbers.

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Bill Priestap, Assistant Director of the Counterintelligence Division at the FBI, testifies about Russian interference in U.S. elections to the Senate Intelligence Committee in Washington, U.S., June 21, 2017.

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Joshua Roberts/Reuters

The cyberattacks continued right up to the election,
according to a top-secret National
Security Agency document leaked to the
Intercept and published earlier this month. The document
revealed that hackers associated with Russia's military
intelligence agency targeted a company with information on US
voting software days before the election, and used the data to
launch "voter-registration-themed" cyberattacks on local
government officials.

Bill Priestap, one of the FBI's top counterintelligence
officials, told the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday
that the type of data can be used "in a variety of ways,"
including to manipulate future elections and target individual
voters. As Nevins, the Florida Republican operative, had said,
the data is also extremely valuable - politically and
financially.

Earlier this week, it emerged that data-analytics firm
hired by the Republican National Committee last year to gather
political information about US voters accidentally leaked
the sensitive personal details of roughly 198 million citizens
earlier this month, as its database was left exposed on the open
web for nearly two weeks.

Upon reviewing the exposed data - which included names,
dates of birth, home addresses, phone numbers, and voter
registration details, as well as proprietary information based on
predictive models of voters' behavior - Joseph Lorenzo
Hall, the chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and
Technology said simply: "This data is worth a s---load of money."

Archie Agarwal, the founder of the cybersecurity firm
ThreatModeler, agreed that the data was a "gold mine" for anyone
looking to target and manipulate voters. The security researcher
who discovered the leaked database, Chris Vickery, said it was
the kind of information "you can use to steal an election at the
state and local level. It tells you who you need to advertise to
to swing votes."